1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a battery pack monitoring apparatus for monitoring a battery pack constituted of battery blocks connected in series and each including battery cells connected in series.
2. Description of Related Art
As such a battery pack monitoring apparatus, there is known the one which includes a voltage detection component provided for each of the battery blocks. For example, refer Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2007-232417. Such voltage detection components can be implemented as an IC, for example.
However, the conventional battery pack monitoring apparatus as described in the above patent document has a problem in that the amount of data to be handled becomes enormous when it is used for a system which uses a number of battery cells such as the one for use in an electric vehicle, because the battery voltage has to be detected for each of the battery cells.
Take an electric vehicle on which 240 battery cells are mounted as an example, since each of the battery cells is charged and discharged with a large current at a high frequency, an expensive computation circuit is needed to perform high-rate data sampling and processing in order to monitor the states of each of the battery cells.